Things like MISRA C make me sad. I wish we were all using better things, be it Ada, or formal methods, or whatever.

Hah! My horrible (truly, truly horrible) code. I mean, the graph output was nice compared to what it replaced, but when I went to rewrite it later (a project that never got fully released, oh well) I wanted to go back in time and back-handed slap myself in the face.

https://metacpan.org/pod/Bio::GMOD::Blast::Graph

P.S. I am a little annoyed that the list could be interpreted as meaning I am not "first author" when in fact I wrote pretty much literally all the code, and was the one who had the idea for the whole project in the first place. Oh well. :-)

I want

"Abstraction without visualization"

to become a software engineering complaint mantra along the lines of

"Taxation without representation"

as an evil to be abhorred.

Abstraction (in the software development sense) kills, in the "news at 11!" sense.

Of course, the lack of it does, too.